Hiroshima Survivor Recounts Day-August 6, 2008

This Wednesday, the City of Saskatoon will commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima by the United States with a peace rally at noon at the Rotary Park Peace Pole. Mayor Don Atchison will be speaking at the Hiroshima Day commemoration as part of Saskatoon’s newly declared Peace Week from Aug. 3 to 9. Mayor Don Atchison is part of Mayors for Peace, a worldwide coalition of mayors for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Setsuko Thurlow was only 13 years old when the atomic bomb hit her hometown of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

She was less than two kilometers away from ground zero.

“I was lucky enough to survive,” said Thurlow, who was inside a building at the time of the explosion. ” The building collapsed and I was buried under the collapsed building. Somebody dug me out. Other classmates who were with me in the same room burned.”

Thurlow believes it is the responsibility of the survivors to share their experience as a warning to the world.

“We are the only ones who experienced that,” she said, “People have to imagine what the consequences would be if we were stupid enough to start that kinds of war again. We believe that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot co-exist. The issue of nuclear weapons is a universal one.”

This Wednesday, the City of Saskatoon will commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima by the United States with a peace rally at noon at Rotary Park Peace Pole.

While Thurlow will not be speaking at Saskatoon’s commemoration, she was the inspiration for the yearly remembrance.

Other speakers at the commemoration will include Rev. Hiraku Iwai of Saskatoon, artist and U of S student Jillian Cyca and John Crawford of Project Ploughshares.